It is starting to look like my decision never to take an Uber cab because the outfit was "not that nice" was probably the right decision as the outfit faces fresh allegations of illegal activities.

Uber is facing fresh allegations that it deliberately took steps to keep its "unlawful schemes from seeing the light of day". The allegations were made in a hearing in a lawsuit between Uber and Alphabet's Waymo self-driving car unit.

A letter from a former Uber security analyst Richard Jacobs's attorney to an Uber lawyer testified that there was a directive for Uber employees to use disappearing chat apps like Wickr. In his letter, Jacobs said that Uber sent employees to Pittsburgh to "educate" them on how to prevent "Uber's unlawful schemes from seeing the light of day".

He reportedly made other bombshell allegations in the letter, including that employees at Uber were trained to "impede" ongoing investigations, multiple media outlets reported.

Uber hired several contractors that employed former CIA spooks to help infiltrate its rivals' computers overseas, Jacobs said during questioning.

Jacobs said he has spoken with government officials about his allegations. He backed away from some of the allegations in the letter, much of which was redacted from public view.

Ed Russo, a current member of the Uber risk and threat analysis team, disputed some of the allegations in the letter in testimony. He told the court that it was never the role of him or his team "to engage in theft of trade secrets".

Waymo sued Uber in February, claiming that former Waymo executive Anthony Levandowski downloaded more than 14,000 confidential files before leaving to set up a self-driving truck company, called Otto, which Uber acquired soon after.

Levandowski has declined to answer questions about the allegations, citing constitutional protections against self-incrimination.

Russo said former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick never consulted the security team on communications with Levandowski over the acquisition of Levandowski's company Otto.

A trial was set to begin on December 4 but was delayed on Tuesday in a win for Waymo, which had requested more time to investigate the allegations in the letter. Waymo said it learned of the new evidence last week after the US Department of Justice shared it with the judge overseeing the case.

At the hearing in San Francisco federal court, US District Judge William Alsup said it would be a "huge injustice" to force Waymo to go to trial now, adding that Uber "withheld evidence".

Waymo said Uber concealed the letter despite demands from Waymo and the judge to disclose all relevant evidence. "The public is going to hear everything" about the disputed evidence, the judge said at Tuesday's hearing.

Waymo told CNBC the new evidence was "significant and troubling" and lauded the opportunity for more investigation.

Google’s self-driving car unit Waymo abandoned developing features that required drivers to take control in dangerous situations because drivers tended to nod off when in auto-pilot mode and were not ready to take over.

Experiments of the technology in Silicon Valley that showed test users napping, putting on makeup and fiddling with their phones as the vehicles travelled up to 56 mph.

Waymo boss John Krafcik told reporters that about five years ago the company envisioned technology that could autonomously drive cars on highways as a quick way to get to the market.

Other self-driving automakers include similar autopilot features for highway-driving in vehicles, but they require drivers to take over the steering wheel in tricky situations. Waymo planned to do the same.

“What we found was pretty scary”, Krafcik said during a media tour of a Waymo testing facility. “It’s hard to take over because they have lost contextual awareness.”

Krafcik said the company determined a system that asked drivers to jump in at the sound of an alert was unsafe after seeing videos from inside self-driving cars during tests.

The company decided to focus solely on technology that didn’t require human intervention a couple of days after the napping incident, said Krafcik, who joined as CEO in 2015. It has also since argued against allowing “handoffs” between automated driving systems and people.

“Our technology takes care of all of the driving, allowing passengers to stay passengers”, the company said in a report this month.

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said artificial intelligence would enable fully automated cars within four years, but played down a demand for its chips from cryptocurrency miners.

Huang told the assorted throngs, riff-raff and great unwashed who attended a company event in Taipei: “It will take no more than four years to have fully autonomous cars on the road. How long it takes for the vast majority of cars on the road to become that, it really just depends.”

He said that cars are not the only thing which could be automated – many tasks in companies that can be automated... the productivity of society will go up.

But Huang joined peers taming expectations of strong revenue growth from a wave of interest in cryptocurrencies. AMD predicted this week that there will be some levelling off of cryptocurrency demand.

“Revenue for us in crypto is over $100 million a quarter. For us, it’s a small percentage... It’s obviously not a target market”, Huang said.

Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies that use encryption techniques for security and can be traded. Miners use computers to process cryptocurrency transactions, and they are rewarded with additional cryptocurrency.

While driverless cars are supposed to be the next big thing, there is a significant hurdle they have to overcome – power.

According to BorgWarner, prototypes for fully autonomous systems consume two to four kilowatts of electricity - the equivalent of having 50 to 100 laptops continuously running in the boot.

Self-driving technology is a huge power drain and robotaxis which are constantly on the road will be too energy hungry to run on battery power alone, according to Chris Thomas, BorgWarner’s chief technology officer.

To be sure, those calculations are based on prototype cars with sensors rigged on the roof, and the power demands of electronics inside the car will inevitably fall as the technology improves. But even if chipmakers pull off promises to reduce power consumption by as much as 90 percent, automakers will still need to make fuel efficiency gains elsewhere in the vehicles to compensate for all that computing, Thomas said.

“They’re worried about one watt, and now you’re adding a couple thousand”, Thomas said. “It’s not trivial.”

The report said that a fully autonomous subcompact car like a Honda Fit, for example, will get 54.6 miles to the gallon in 2025 in the best-case scenario, more than five miles below the US's emissions target.

A small pickup or SUV would be at 45.8 mpg, versus a target of 50. What is worrying is that engineers don't have much time to resolve this, as companies are planning to deploy their first fully self-driving cars in the next couple of years.

Mary Gustanski, chief technology officer of supplier Delphi Automotive Plc's powertrain business, said that the only way for automakers to meet the power hungry needs of self-driving systems will be to use gasoline-electric hybrid models rather than purely electric cars.

British inventor Sir James Dyson is planning to build a “radically different” electric car which will be on sale in 2020.

While Apple has been greatly hyped and got nowhere with its car bid, Dyson, who is famous for re-inventing the vacuum cleaner, has been quietly getting on with 400 Wiltshire engineers since 2015. In fact people only became aware of the project when it was accidently leaked in a government report.

It has set him back £2.5 billion and while there is no prototype, the car’s electric motor is ready, while two different battery types are under development that he claimed were already more efficient than in existing electric cars.

Dyson said consumers would have to “wait and see” what the car would look like: “We don’t have an existing chassis … We’re starting from scratch. What we’re doing is quite radical.”

Sadly it is going to cost an arm and a leg to buy so while it might end up being the most efficient on the market, most of us are not going to be able to afford one.

He told the Guardian that the car will count as a British export although it will probably be manufactured in the Far East.

While the UK remained a “frontrunner” for the production base, he added: “We’ll choose the best place to make it and that’s where we’ll make it … Wherever we make the battery, that’s where we will make the car. We see a very large market for this car in the Far East … We want to be near where our markets are and I believe the Far East has reacted [to electric] more quickly than the UK or Europe.”

Research and development work on the car will continue at a new facility being built on a former Second World War airfield at Hullavington, close to Dyson’s headquarters in Malmesbury, Wiltshire.

However it will not be driverless. Dyson thinks total hands-off driving is some way off.

Qualcomm has introduced a new Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) chipset and reference design that aims to bring automakers one step closer to deploying the communications systems necessary for fully autonomous vehicles.

Ford, Audi, the PSA Group and SAIC are all endorsing the new chipset which means that it will get out there.

Qualcomm says that the 9150 C-V2X chipset will be available for commercial sampling in the second half of 2018, and is based on specs from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). This is a collaboration between groups of telecommunications associations.

Apple fanboys have taken Jobs’ Mob to court for not doing enough to protect them while driving.

Apparently Apple is supposed to be super-cool and have the health and safety of its fanboys at heart and provide a mechanism to shut off the iPhone when driving.

Julio Ceja, who is bringing a class action against Jobs' Mob, said that Apple of placing profit ahead of consumer safety by not implementing a mechanism that would lock out drivers and/or disable the iPhone while in the car to prevent it from being used.

We guess he thinks that Apple knows its users are too stupid to turn off their phones when driving and will automatically pick them up when they use them. We would have thought this was just a straight case of Dawin's law and the eventual means that Apple fanboys remove themselves from the genepool to allow humanity to evolve.

Ceja claims to have been in a vehicular accident where the driver of a vehicle hit his because the other driver was texting on their iPhone. This is actually not the first time that Apple has been accused of this, although in the previous cases the company has prevailed, where the judge in a previous case claimed that it is the driver’s decision to operate their vehicle negligently, and gave an example of how driving home drunk and getting into an accident is no more the fault of the company who sold the alcohol.

Still Apple had to appear in court and state the bloody obvious that it cannot be held responsible for the antics of its stupid users, even if it does make shedloads of cash by targeting its products for them.

Hyundai says it is placing electric vehicles at the center of its product strategy - one that includes plans for a premium long distance electric car as it seeks to catch up to Tesla.

Hyundai had initially championed fuel cell technology as the future of eco-friendly vehicles but has found itself shifting electric as Tesla shot to prominence and battery-powered cars have gained government backing in China. Toyota is now also working on longer distance, fast charging electric vehicles, local media have reported.

The South Korean automaker is planning to launch an electric sedan under its high-end Genesis brand in 2021 with a range of 500 km (310 miles) per charge. It will also introduce an electric version of its Kona small sport SUV with a range of 390 km in the first half of next year.

Executive Vice President Lee Kwang-guk told a news conference that it was strengthening its eco-friendly car strategy, centering on electric vehicles.

The automaker and affiliate Kia which together rank fifth in global vehicle sales, also said they were adding three plug-in vehicles to their plans for eco-friendly cars, bringing the total to 31 models by 2020.

Underscoring Hyundai's electric shift, those plans include eight battery powered and two fuel cell vehicles - a contrast to its 2014 announcement for 22 models, of which only two were slated to be battery-powered.

Hyundai confirmed it is developing its first dedicated electric vehicle platform, which will allow the company to produce multiple models with longer driving ranges.

Last year, it launched its first mass market pure electric car IONIQ, but the vehicle's per-charge driving range is much shorter than offerings from Tesla and General Motors (GM.N).

Hyundai unveiled a near production version of its new fuel cell SUV with a driving range of more than 580 km per charge, compared with the 415 km for its current Tucson fuel cell SUV.

The mid-sized SUV will be launched in Korea early next year, followed by the US and European markets.

A fuel cell electric bus is slated to be unveiled late this year, while a sedan type fuel cell car is also planned. Even so, analysts noted that gaining traction with fuel cells was going to be a long hard slog partly due to a lack of charging infrastructure.

"Hyundai will achieve economies of scale for fuel cell cars by 2035 at the earliest", said Lee Hang-koo, a senior research fellow at Korea Institute for Industrial Economics & Trade.

"Before that, Hyundai has no choice but to rely on battery cars", he said.

The car maker Tesla might be finding itself in hot water after installing a camera inside the car to monitor the driver.

The camera is currently deactivated, and Tesla fans think it might be for attention monitoring during autonomous or semi-autonomous driving, but Tesla is not saying anything. Its discovery comes amid growing discussion in the auto industry as to how drivers and increasingly capable self-driving systems should divide the workload.

The camera is in the Model 3 which the automaker delivered last week. The camera is integrated up above the rear-view mirror in the pod which contains some of the front-facing cameras Tesla uses for its Autopilot system. The company confirmed it was a camera which covers the whole cabin and its occupants.

Elektrek speculates that it could be activated as part of Tesla’s upcoming Tesla Network, where owners of the electric cars will be able to dispatch them out as autonomous taxis when they’re not needed. Being able to review what happened in the case of an accident or when damage occurs, for instance, might be essential for putting owners’ minds at risk since, unlike with Uber or Lyft, they won’t be present in the vehicle themselves.

Another possibility is that the camera will be instrumental in managing attention during semi-autonomous and fully autonomous driving. Currently, most driver assistance systems rely on periodic contact or torque on the steering wheel in order to reassure the car that the driver is still aware of what’s going on around them.

Managing attention has long been a point of concern for automotive regulators, but cars that are smarter about taking on the more mundane stretches of road have accelerated those worries. Back in 2016, NHTSA research suggested the magic bullet on nudging drivers to stay involved still hadn’t been found, and warned that “operators may have somewhat calibrated their trust to the capabilities of the automation” only to come in for a surprise later on when the reality didn’t live up to their expectations.

Of course Tesla would not be spying on users to monitor the car's use for marketing purposes would it?

Toyota is in production engineering for a solid state battery, which uses a solid electrolyte instead of the conventional semi-liquid version used in today's lithium-ion batteries.

The company said it aims to put the new tech in production electric vehicles as early as 2020.

The improved battery technology would make it possible to create smaller, more lightweight lithium-ion batteries for use in EVs, that could also potentially boost the total charge capacity and result in longer-range vehicles.

Batteries are a key limiting factor for electric vehicle design. The move to solid state would help make room for more gains in terms of charge capacity achieved in the footprint available in consumer vehicles, while helping to push further existing efficiencies achieved through things like the use of ultra-light materials in car frames and interiors.

Another improvement for this type of battery would be longer overall usable life which would make it possible to both use the vehicles they're installed in for longer, and add potential for product recycling and alternative post-vehicle life - some companies are already looking into putting EV batteries into use in home and commercial energy storage, for example.